Saving the Orange

Citrus greening is a bacterial disease that is devastating orange groves world-wide. The only hope is to engineer a resistant plant by genetic modification. But will the consumer accept this?

"Before humans were involved, corn was a wild grass, tomatoes were tiny, carrots were only rarely orange and dairy cows produced little milk." Did you know that "the vast majority of oranges in commercial groves are the product of a type of genetic merging that predates the Romans, in which a slender shoot of a favored fruit variety is grafted onto the sturdier roots of other species: lemon, for instance, or sour orange. And a seedless midseason orange recently adopted by Florida growers emerged after breeders bombarded a seedy variety with radiation to disrupt its DNA.."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-the-orange-by-altering-its-dna.html